Welcome to Issue # 23 of Plume.

You may recall—though probably not—that last time in this space I asked for readers’ comments on our new look. Much to my astonishment, I have received a good number of them—and all positive. Which gives me pause… and yet… there it is. Most have commented favorably on the clarity of the new form, its sparseness, and its ease of navigation. Also—Plume appears to work very nicely on mobile devices.

Precisely as I’d hoped. Many thanks to all who took a moment to write.

Our renovation of the Archive system, you may have noted, is well underway. For more on this, sign up for our Newsletter, now conveniently placed on the Menu in each issue.  You can also now follow us on Twitter @PlumePoetry.

This month’s Reading Recommendations from David Cudar (complemented last month by Julie Sheehan’s) are missing this issue due to a family emergency. However, as noted—again in our Newsletter, Ron Slate has asked a number of poets and writers—including me, for some reason—to post their own summer reading lists. More on this in the Newsletter. You can find Ron’s ongoing installments of this compilation here.

Our cover art this month is from Jay Muhlin, whose work has appeared in various editorial publications worldwide. In 2008 Muhlin published his first long-term book project entitled Half Life: A Portrait of Lauren. The book documents the life and suicide of a close friend and the artist’s relationship to her. Jay was a visiting faculty member at Bennington College in 2011, and currently teaches a darkroom-based class at the College of New Jersey. Muhlin is an artist member of Vox Populi, and his studio is in Philadelphia, PA.

This month’s issue features new poems from Amy Beeder, Andrea Cohen, Brian Culhane, Elizabeth Arnold, Flávia Rocha, G.C. Waldrep, Ira Sadoff, Maureen McLane, Eric Pankey, Karl Krolow (translated by Stuart Friebert—and great thanks to Suhrkamp Verlag/Berlin for permission to use the Krolow texts), Katia Kapovich, and Sophie Cabot Black; our “Featured Selection” is from Mark Irwin, a translation of an extract from Alain Borer’s Hyle:The fundamental question of poetry.

New work received these last few weeks comes from, among others, Ruth Padel, Peter Balakian, Karen An-hwei Lee, Meighan Sharp, Juan Felipe Herrara, Jennifer Michael Hecht, J. Allyn Rosser, David Huddle, and Diane Wakoski.

Much gratitude, as always, and I do hope you enjoy the issue!

Daniel Lawless
Editor, Plume

listening for worms

just as the lion knew to follow St. Jerome
calmly while they

walked through the priests

who are running for their lives
in Carpaccio’s painting in Venice,

birds opening their beaks

hoping to touch St. Francis who was a lover of views,
especially the one visible from his

home in high Assisi

until natural beauty failed him altogether
once he’d almost died

which turned him

utterly exclusively to concentrate on what can happen
mind-to-mind—body-to-body if you’re lucky.

Barring that

we can’t even hear an earthquake coming,
a volcano at the start

throwing its boulders up

the endless-seeming chimney to the hole
that can be the size of a human head

—as one man learned when he

crawled down
into the crater to see—

or three miles in circumference.

Elizabeth Arnold is the author of three books of poetry—The Reef (University of Chicago Press, 1999), Civilization (Flood Editions, 2006), and Effacement (Flood Editions, 2010). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Slate, Poetry, The Nation, Kenyon Review, Conjunctions, TriQuarterly, Chicago Review, Antioch Review, Tikkun, and Oxford University Press’s Literary Imagination. She is on the MFA faculty at the University of Maryland.

though Sweetwater overflowed and Otay broke

I filled your reservoirs as I was asked.

Yes twenty souls were lost, they say, or more;

still Hatfield was upbeat, knowing he’d arranged

the matter of such long-awaited rain  Come

from out of nowhere with a digging stick,

his secret chemicals & elemental price

to fill the reservoirs as he was asked.

The rain was free, except his cost per inch.

Did San Diego never read a fairy tale?

Such weighty matter, that abundant rain—

On the Altiplano in a dry December, families

still bake the dough-boy, dough-girl. Seeded children

ask the rain to fill the furrows, reservoirs.

Their teeth are pumpkin seeds, their eyes are beans.

Clothe them in paper, offer them fire.

 I filled your reservoir as I was asked

with lovely matter: rain, the banquet rain—

In 1916, the “Rainmaker” Charles Malloy Hatfield was hired to fill the reservoirs of drought-stricken San Diego by his method of releasing 23 secret chemicals into the air. It subsequently rained so heavily that the Otay and Lower Sweetwater dams overflowed or  broke; the number of deaths attributed to that flooding is still a matter of dispute.

Amy Beeder is the author of Burn the Field (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2006). Her work has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Nation, The Kenyon Review, and other journals. She teaches poetry at the University of New Mexico.

One who you thought also wanted, staring back

With an idea of increase, until both

Were trading in this for that, each sign

Ready to be agreed upon as if

With enough we will have covered the entire

Meadow with all possible. The uncertain

Is taken into account as each of us

Prepares for more than is necessary

To be near what is almost ours

And to watch for defect; even damage can be useful.

To have it all known, your business,

Is to persuade the world. Only

When you see others see you, do you know.

Sophie Cabot Black, whose poems appear frequently in the New Yorker and The Atlantic, is author of three collections of poetry: The Misunderstanding of Nature, The Descent, and The Exchange, forthcoming in May, 2013.

has passed, scratch on X

inside that box, as if

the past were a treasure

map and the sweet spot

for digging just missed.

Others, more hurried, employ

a slash-and-yearn policy,

their single diagonal suggesting

a ladder that showed up

too late for actual scrambling.

At the edge of known

physics, theorists like to say

days and minutes don’t exist.

But calendars do: you can mass

produce them with snapshots

of aspirations in Lisbon and Madrid.

In a pinch, in winter, they make

fine logs for the fire; in summer,

fans for shadeless expanses.

The fans burn too. Days are

like that: elastic and highly flammable.

Andrea Cohen’s poems and stories have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, The Threepenny Review, Glimmer Train, The Hudson Review and elsewhere. Her most recent poetry collections are Kentucky Derby (Salmon, 2011) and Long Division (Salmon, 2009). Her fourth collection, Furs Not Mine, will be published by Four Way Books

1. A sharp mountain ridge 2. Excellence, valor, virtue

The Hemingway who wrote three stories in a crummy hotel
Is my kind of hero, squatting in litter of butts and shot glasses,
Perspiring mightily through the Madrid nights, sleeping
In sodden triumph on the scattered drafts worth keeping
For the train to Paris where, sober in the mountain passes,
He hears a steward announce morning coffee with a brass bell,

As he strikes phrases with practiced flick, keen to make plain
What ought to be told in American; and then sitting back
Alone, happy, happy with himself and his art and the sun
Coming up after such a night and the foul taxi to the station
And the lost ticket, running, running along a steaming track,
Shouting, Arrêtez you bastards! Stop the goddamn train!

Eurydice

Their legend is a look in the eyes of the one
Who stops and has to look back. That one.

We name him and we name her, in the story
Handed down—whose details always blur.

There’s something so appealing in his need.
The human desire to turn, if just once,

To see if the beloved comes. Making certain,
Just once, that the slurred footsteps are hers.

There is something so natural in his look back.
It reminds me of how, in turning to gaze

At a maple blazing with reds last October,
My eyes lost it in the split-second after,

As I turned back to the curving road ahead.
The present like a cold wheel in my hands.

Brian Culhane’s poetry has appeared widely in such journals as The New Republic, The Hudson Review, and The Paris Review. In 2007, he was awarded the Poetry Foundation’s Emily Dickinson First Book Prize; his winning manuscript, The King’s Question, was published by Graywolf Press in 2008.

in ’34, seven years before the war,

you saw the first bombs rain upon your shtetl

at 6 am, people falling under silver trickles

of fire, the bridge collapsing behind you

without a sound (your mother had covered your ears

with her hands). Those red shoes you wore, the yellow dress,

the new watch (a gift from your dad), and pearls of tears

were your good luck charms during the wartime mess.

When your father went missing you wrote on passing trains

the time, your name and the name of the village

you were being taken to. What did you write it with?

I’ve never asked you whether it was a rock,

a piece of chalk or a nail that left your message

on the green train cars. How did you manage?

Was it worth it? Sixty seven, to be precise, years later

is it still visible as your granddaughter

bites on her pen writing about you,

fishing for “something memorable” for a project due

tomorrow, that you were born in a kingdom whose king

was a little boy.

Katia Kapovich has published seven books of poetry in Russian and two in English, the latest Cossacks and Bandits (Salt, 2008). Her poems have appeared in the London Review of Books, Poetry, The New Republic, Harvard Review, The Independent, Jacket, and many others.  She is a co-editor of Fulcrum.

Morning with its rye distaff
Extrudes the sweet giddiness
From their blood.
And gentle sleep, which pestered them in the leaves,
Purified itself in the early bite of nettles,
Which hurts.

The sheaf of pain, the buried sorrow,
Grows more exact now
In the drifting cold.
The green wind tastes bitter to their palate –
Like the skin of plums, in the strong shakes of day
They find themselves in.

They move slowly in their strange limbs,
Without replies
Streaked by light.
And while sighs wend their way to the sky
A heart grown dumb must defend against ashes
And does not recognize itself.

 
Das Paar

So sind sie aus der Nächte Haft gestiegen.
Halten verschwiegen
Die Augen hin.
Sie fühlen noch die Sternenflut im Haare
Wie Spinnwebschleier, alles Wunderbare
Um Mund und Kinn.

Der Morgen treibt mit schmaler Roggenspindel
Den süßen Schwindel
Aus ihrem Blut.
Und zarter Schlaf, der sie im Laub gepeinigt,
Hat sich im frühen Nesselbiß gereinigt,
Der wehe tut.

Das Bündel Schmerzen , die vergrabene Trauer,
Wird nun genauer
Im kalten Wehn.
Der grüne Wind schmeckt ihrem Gaumen bitter
Wie Pflaumenhaut, im starken Taggezitter,
Drin sie sich sehn.

Sie rühren langsam sich in fremden Gliedern,
Ohne Erwidern
Gestriemt vom Licht.
Und während Seufzer sich zum Himmel kehren,
Muß das verstummte Herz der Asche wehren
Und kennt sich nicht.

Translated from the German by Stuart Friebert

Karl Krolow (1915-1998) was one of the giants of German Letters of  the last century.  He made his mark early and often, with poems, translations, and criticism, later adding prose to his staggering output, which includes more than thirty volumes of poems, among them several Selected tomes, each with a life and mind of its own.  Ranging across many subjects and themes, in a variety of voices, at once abstract and detached, but so focused and concentrated that what is observed and spoken becomes intimate, even voyeuristic, but never without illuminating basic human wants, needs, and values.  Krolow was fond of quoting Flaubert, who most wanted to write a book about nothing, which would wind up being about everything. That sums up Krolow’s own ways with words.  As a critic, a judge of literary competitions, as president of The German Academy of Language and Literature (1972-1975), he was generous to a fault regarding the work of others.  Almost no writer who lived during Krolow’s time was without his direct or indirect support.

Stuart Friebert, for whose first book of German poems Krolow wrote the afterword, had the great privilege of knowing and working with Krolow on a number of occasions. Enjoying “a lifetime right to translate” Krolow, he has published two volumes of Selected Poems (On Account Of: Selected Poems of Karl Krolow/The Field Translation Series; What’ll We Do With This Life?: Selected Poems by Karl Krolow, 1950-1990/Fairleigh Dickinson U. Press), and Bitter Oleander Press will publish a third volume, Puppets in the Wind, in 2014-15. The author of a dozen books of his own poems, and a number of stories, memoir pieces, essays, and anthologies, Friebert has published six other volumes: co-translations, from the Czech, Italian, Romanian, and Lithuanian.

followed us west

as if hot on the scent

of tomato—

O brave New World

your fruits have gone incognito!

A rosé’s a rosé’s a rosé

with love apples.

You are moving west

beyond the Chinese coast

to the interior

of inner Mongolia.  A threatened

horse rides again

the steppes unburdening

themselves below revived hooves.

The time of the emperor

is nigh.  No inquisition

will be able to check

the future.  Your local

grapes are delicious

picked off the vine

or bottled, thus.

This is the interval

between eras of fathers,

dictators fallen, the marble

fists crushed and not crushing.

But the future, its empress,

who can say what beast

she’ll ride to meet us?

Raise a glass, comrades—

all you who refuse

to forget the civil war.

Maureen N. McLane is the author of two collections of poetry, Same Life (FSG, 2008) and World Enough (FSG, 2010). Her newest book is My Poets, also from FSG.

Even dust is divisible.
Sand transmutes to transparency.

The distance one travels in a day,
What we call a journey, is as far as the space between words,

The distance between sawhorses that hold up a child’s casket.
In the dream I am myself but somehow vacant or vacated,

Late, or left behind, unable to fit the little I’ve brought again into the duffle.
Synonyms, not the words I need, at hand.

Evening river.
A ladder of fire extinguished one rung at a time:

The yellow of buckthorn berry, burry hatchings on goldleaf.
The tense of pain is the present.

Like a deer cornered by a pack of hounds, the now freezes.
Something has happened. Something is about to happen.

Although I cannot see beyond it, the window frames an exterior.
What if there were no frame,

No scale, no lens, no vantage point, merely a grid set down?
Although the sound is muted, I can see the actress speaks with a lisp.

Who are these storm-drenched castaways?
Where is this island forged from magma?

I imagine the soundtrack might offer a counterpoint to the narrative’s murk,
But the commercials come on at such a volume I can’t face it.

We all have failures over which to brood.
These acts, ritualized, have lost their savagery and are now symbolic,

And even the antecedents of the symbols have been forgotten.
How does one measure the year:  the threshers unpaid? Spring floods?

Ice cutters on the river? Ice cluttered on the river?
The car won’t start?

What comfort to think that the great beast
Will be thrown into a lake of fire,

That a story, however picaresque, resolves on the final page,
As quaint as that may seem.

Sometimes I feel like one of those castaways—
Shipwrecked, stranded, marooned—

With a single blade, a length of rope, wishing I knew a few more poems by heart,
Knew how to start a fire, knew how to spin thread.

That river I mentioned, evening river I called it:
No way to map it except to map the history of its meanders.

We know the prophetic in retrospect,
Thus renumber the thousand stars

So that the lines connecting them
Equal hyena trampled by zebra or hero filching fire from the gods.

Luckily, nothing is impervious to interpretation—
Afterthoughts, premonitions, the slimmest hunches.

This morning, I recalled an old love, fondly, as one should,
Without the what-if. Recall is perhaps the wrong word.

Slightly out of focus, between the gaps and lacunae that riddle memory,
I saw her face, or rather a look she’d give me sometimes

That meant to me then bewildered affection,
As if already she could imagine her life beyond me.

One rarely recalls the looks on one’s own face.
In the mirror all one can do is pose,

Attempt a pose that looks unposed.
“Allegories,” Walter Benjamin writes, “are in the realm of thought

What ruins are in the realm of things.”
Things, unlike thoughts, are mute, but read as signs,

Shimmer and echo, replete in their articulations,
Or so it seems as the cedar waxwings worry the holly berries each year.

In Bruegel’s “Procession to Calvary,” starlings wheel
Above the crowds that gather at the gallows.

Hard to tell what all the day has in store for them,
Which is the good thief and which the bad.

The windmill perched upon a cliff,
(what could its function be at that height?)

Draws our eyes up to a single storm cloud.
My father would light a cigarette while one still smoked

In the ashtray, gray ash lengthening before it fell.
More often than not he had two or three cigarettes going at once.

I would watch the smoke go from slack and slumped
To thin and taut—improbable architecture of curlicues,

Tangles and arabesques—as it unraveled itself into nothing.
Hard to pick Jesus out amid that crowd.

A horse skull anchors the painting’s lower right corner.
I stand up too quickly, feel dizzy,

Hold onto the library bookshelf until I find my balance.
Or I turn a corner in a hurry and knock

Someone’s grocery bag from her hands.
I apologize sincerely and somehow she hears my words,

Hears them and makes sense of them
(that is, it seems, the miracle: that I am a body, not a ghost;

That I make embodied words, not ghost-sounds).
I make small talk as I kneel to pick up a head cauliflower,

Three limes, and a flat tin of minced clams.
Sometimes I step out into traffic

To hear the tires screech, the horns held.
Hard to recall a time when gravity did not welcome my next step.

Now, as then, sleep leans against the door like a dog waiting to be let in.
It is summer. The half-framed-in new construction seems transient:

Parched August straw in a back-draft,
Stick houses passing car might tumble.

The heat jangles where the road dips,
A mirage darkened with reflection.

Unwilled, the present leaks into the past, tinctures it.
A poem is not a séance and yet how quickly the shades crowd in

Expecting elegy and lamentation.
The moon subtracts zero from zero.

Like an invisible ink one heats to legibility,
The poem reiterates the spent, the long lost, what I tend to call

The nameless haunt of the irremediable,
Yet I go on naming it, nonetheless,

And inter it in words.
I forget just when I started relying on bad memory as an alibi.

Eric Pankey is the author of eight collections of poetry. His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Antaeus, The Antioch Review, The Gettysburg Review, Grand Street, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, New Republic, The New Yorker, The Quarterly, Shenandoah, and many others publications. He is a winner of the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets.  His most recent books of poetry are The Pear as One Example: New and Selected Poems 1984-2008 and Trace (2013).